The Inbound marketing methodology is the most cost-efficient and rewarding marketing strategy you can set up for your small business.
The inbound marketing methodology has famously been developed by a company called HubSpot. They are truly leaders in the marketing industry and provide great resources and insights into adopting this methodology for your own business.
In this blog article, we will cover the nuances of the inbound marketing methodology and some ways you can implement it into your overall marketing strategy.
What is the Inbound Marketing Methodology?
Inbound Marketing is when you attract your customers to your website or landing page in the hope they will enter your marketing funnel. The inbound marketing methodology is composed of three stages; attract stage, engage stage, and delight stage.
A website visitor enters your marketing funnel by showing interest in your product or service and completes a lead generation form on your website. This is the “attract stage”.
Once you have their information, you then begin to nurture the lead with information usually provided through email related to the problem they need to be solved, dropping subtle hints that the product or service you provide is the solution to their problem. Your lead is now in the “engage stage”.
Once enough time has passed and you deem the lead to be marketing qualified, you will pass their information to your sales team and begin to nudge them into ultimately converting on your product or service.
Once they purchase, they will begin the delight stage where you will send them more messaging related to keeping a healthy relationship alive like product updates, thanking them for purchasing, etc.
Attract Stage (Discovery & Awareness Stage)
The “attract” stage is how you acquire strangers to your website. In the buyer or customer journey, this is also referred to as the discovery & awareness stage.
This part of the methodology is the widest part of the marketing funnel. Everyone that has access to the internet potentially is eligible to enter your inbound funnel, however, that is not best practice.
You should create a buyer persona for your product or service, which helps you get into the shoes of your target audience. You will then make marketing collateral based on the preferences for that target audience to attract them to your website.
How Do You Attract Customers to Your Website?
There are two ways you can bring customers to your site. Organic and paid efforts.
Organic User Acquisition
Organic methods are free. These are popular among small business owners for that reason. These methods rely on your ideal target audience to discover your business through their research using methods like the various search engines or through social media posts.
Organic Social Media
Social media is such an important tool in the digital age. Practically every business is featured on at least one social media channel these days. With the onset of Facebook and Instagram now allowing stores to sell their products on the platforms, social media is an important driver for customers to browse, purchase and research the companies they are interested in buying from.
To drive traffic organically from social media, you would use methods like posting a status update, photo, video, or a link to your website.
Organic Search (Search Engine Optimization)
A highly recommended method to get your targeted audience to visit your website is to optimize it to be found in search engines.
Your customers generally will use search engines to research their problems. If your website is found on the first couple of pages of the search engine, your odds increase for them to click and visit your website.
Once you establish your website on the first page of the search engines, you will receive unparalleled amounts of traffic to your site, all for free.
However, search engine optimization is not very easy to do and requires a lot of time and patience. There are millions of websites on the internet all competing for the 1st page of Google.
Most major brands dominate the search results and make it difficult for smaller or new businesses to compete with. If you’re crafty enough and display enough fortitude and determination, you can compete with or even outrank the big dogs.
Paid User Acquisition
Every organic method of acquisition has a paid counterpart. For example, you can pay for your listing on Google to show on the first page of the search results using Google Ads. You can use Facebook ads to show posts to more people on Facebook.
Paid user acquisition helps your website get more traffic quickly however there is a cost associated with it. This is great for smaller businesses that might have difficulty gaining a traffic share due to the competition or business owners who want to see results for their efforts pretty quickly.
Engage Stage (Consideration Stage)
The purpose of the engagement stage is to guide your leads and prepare them for final purchase.
The engagement stage requires you to interact with your leads and connect them to content related to the solution of their problem.
Your messaging or content doesn’t have to be all about your product. If you only talk about your product, you run the risk of losing your audience’s attention because no one likes to be sold to all the time.
The goal of the engagement stage is to build trust between the customer and your brand, and become a go-to resource for them if they need their problems solved. You are basically trying to push out your competition becoming an option for your customer.
How do you engage & educate your audience?
The most reliable ways you can engage your audience is through email marketing and content marketing.
Email Marketing
You can create an automated email strategy that sends content to your audience every week. Including things like blogs, how-to articles, and downloadable content in your emails are a great way to keep your brand in the audience’s mind.
Be sure not to be too intrusive with your messaging. You don’t want to bombard your potential customers with emails every day. That will cause them to unsubscribe from your list and lose interest in your brand.
Finding the right content and sending cadence for your audience takes time and a lot of trial and error.
Content Marketing
Curating content that resonates with your audience is the key to any good inbound marketing methodology. Content will play a huge role in every part of the customer journey through your marketing funnel.
Having a content marketing strategy that features relevant and engaging content is extremely crucial. It’s a best practice to plan your content ideas out months in advance and give yourself plenty of time to think and produce the content your audience needs.
The key is to focus on solving their problems. A quick google search using a keyword like “How to….” can give you plenty of ideas and jumping-off points as to the things your audience wants to see and learn about. It would be extremely beneficial for you to create a buyer persona to help guide your content marketing strategy.
Easy-to-digest content like infographics and short-form video content like Tik Toks are being consumed more so than ever in today’s digital world and should be included in your content marketing strategy.
Again, the focus of content marketing is to keep your customer engaged with your brand. Your customer should consider your brand a trustworthy source for information to solve their problems instead of your competitors.
Delight Stage
The delight stage comes into play after the customer purchases your product or service. In this stage, your goal is to keep your customer happy so they will purchase from you again or recommend your product to their networks.
What can you do to delight your audience?
Email marketing again plays a huge role in delighting your audience. You can send an email to your customer thanking them for their purchase and ask for recommendations on how to improve your product or the sale process.
You can also create a weekly newsletter that’ll provide useful information to your audience related to your product or service.
You can also send updates to your customers whenever you make product improvements or release a better product.
From there, you can upsell the customer, and then the inbound marketing methodology will start from the top again.
Conclusion
The Inbound Marketing Methodology can produce tremendous benefits for business. It relies on your customers finding your website in their research to solve their problems. If you focus on ways to attract, engage, and delight your customers, you will put your business in a position to have a successful marketing strategy.
